Heliogabalus: Rome’s #1 Crossdressing Anarchist

The Roses of Heliogabalus, a painting by the Dutch artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. "He [Elagabalus] loaded his parasites with violets and other flowers in a banqueting room with a reversible ceiling, in such a way that some of them expired when they could not crawl out to the surface."

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus had only turned 14 when his mother staged a coup against Emperor Macrinus in 218 AD and replaced him with her son, who had just barely started developing his prefrontal cortex. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, otherwise nicknamed Heliogabalus, went on to collect many more nicknames in his time, mostly for not-so-great reasons. Yet, no matter what name one knows him by, Heliogabalus’s four-year reign quickly fell under the radar even in the eyes of Roman historians, despite his story acting as a looking glass into the most radical themes in Roman society: political corruption, cultists, gender and sexuality, ethnicity and racism, and moral depravity.

If I had to choose one person in all of Roman history as the epitome of decadence, it would be Heliogabalus. For all the hype surrounding Roman emperors (and, more often than not, their depravity), Heliogabalus’s extremely short-lived but extremely iconic career is painfully underrated. Though his actions didn’t prove him much of an upstanding emperor, to be fair, it also wasn’t like Heliogabalus got much of a choice.

Maesa, Heliogabalus’s mother, had likely hoped to control the empire’s reins by crowning her 14-year-old son as her puppet, but she certainly did not foresee Heliogabalus’s utter…incompetence. Once on the throne, Heliogabalus barely paid attention to the army that had worked to put him there. He did not give one thought to the empire’s political strife, the angry plebeians, or the panicking Senate. Instead, he spent his time getting chummy with hunky charioteers and screwing up the aristocracy by nepo-babying his lower class friends into the bureaucracy—much to the public’s distaste, but Heliogabalus’s biggest source of rumor was his love life.

Heliogabalus married at least four times, with some historians even claiming as many as seven. One of them was said to be a Vestal Virgin, a female priest who swears herself to celibacy, and another his charioteer. Back in the Roman times, neither homosexuality nor polyamory were necessarily looked down upon. The Romans did not care who was involved in the deed, but they did care a lot about how the deed was done. In simpler words, to be the submissive one in a relationship was the most degrading, abject characteristic of a Roman man—and Heliogabalus was rather fond of ‘bottoming.’ In court, Heliogabalus flaunted his enjoyment of having a ‘passive’ role in his relationships. Sure enough, rumors stirred. Some thought that Heliogabalus secretly worked as a catamite—a prostitute for other men—and others claimed he had inquired about sexual reassignment surgery. For that reason, the topic of Heliogabalus’s gender expression has become a fiery cause for dissension among modern historians.

In an account, Cassius Dio recounts a time when Heliogabalus, falling head over heels for an athlete, Zoticus, begged his love interest to call him by the title of Lady, not Lord. When Zoticus proved himself to be rather disappointing in bed, Heliogabalus had him drugged and exiled. On Heliogabalus’s emasculating depravity, historian Edward Gibbon wrote: 

"corrupted by his youth, his country, and his fortune, abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury, and soon found disgust and satiety in the midst of his enjoyments. The inflammatory powers of art were summoned to his aid: the confused multitude of women, of wines, and of dishes, and the studied variety of attitude and sauces, served to revive his languid appetites. New terms and new inventions in these sciences, the only ones cultivated and patronized by the monarch, signalized his reign, and transmitted his infamy to succeeding times. A capricious prodigality supplied the want of taste and elegance; and whilst Elagabalus lavished away the treasures of his people in the wildest extravagance, his own voice and that of his flatterers applauded a spirit of magnificence unknown to the tameness of his predecessors. To confound the order of seasons and climates, to sport with the passions and prejudices of his subjects, and to subvert every law of nature and decency, were in the number of his most delicious amusements. A long train of concubines, and a rapid succession of wives, among whom was a vestal virgin, ravished by force from her sacred asylum, were insufficient to satisfy the impotence of his passions. The master of the Roman world affected to copy the dress and manners of the female sex, preferred the distaff to the sceptre, and dishonored the principal dignities of the empire by distributing them among his numerous lovers; one of whom was publicly invested with the title and authority of the emperor’s, or, as he more properly styled himself, of the empress’s husband" (VI).

No one can definitively say that Heliogabalus was transgender or simply a cisgender crossdresser, but it’s uncontested that his gender, like his sexuality, was extremely fluid. He did earn the nickname of a ‘hermaphrodite,’ a title which stuck with him until his untimely death.

To add on to his eccentric behavior, Heliogabalus’s religious impulses were also unwelcome. Specifically, he tried to make a cult around this sun god named Elagabal. Elagabal was a god worshipped in Heliogabalus’s hometown in the east, but his name was unheard of in Rome. Heliogabalus forced his subjects to worship a large black stone (which he claimed to hold the spirit of the god) and perform outlandish Eastern rituals. He dressed himself up in extravagant garments and declared himself the High Priest of the Invincible God Elagabal in front of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, an act so sacrilegious to the Roman elite that this may have well been treason.

Unsurprisingly, Heliogabalus was murdered only 4 years into his reign. His corpse was stripped naked and his head was marched down the streets of Rome for all to see. Heliogabalus’s memory was formally condemned and erased for the next 16 centuries. By some chance, Heliogabalus’s story was revived in the decadent period of 19th century Europe, where the formerly depraved tyrant was turned into a bold symbol of societal transgression: a “sensual hedonist who despised bourgeois morality.”